It is over thirty years since E.P. Thompson's The Making of the Working Class (1963) pushed culture – seen as an active process of coping with and shaping collective experience – higher up the historians' agenda. The waves made by the late twentieth-century ‘turns’ towards culture and language are still being felt. This highly diverse movement has also been shaped by theorists such as Foucault and Bourdieu, whom Thompson would undoubtedly have regarded as being suspiciously ‘continental’ but whose work has made an exciting contribution to the historian's repertoire.